Editorial on: current state of empyema management

Semenkovich and colleagues report in their article “Current state of empyema management” on the up-to-date practice of empyema management based on retrospectively analyzed patient cohort (from 2009 to 2014) within the statewide comprehensive, longitudinal maintained New York Inpatient Database (1). They focused on patients hospitalized for inpatient treatment of primary pleural empyema and stratified these patients based on their definitive intervention into three cohorts: (I) patients received only medical therapy with chest tube drainage or surgical therapy with (II) video-assisted thoracoscopic surgery (VATS) or (III) conventional open surgery (COS) (1). They totally screened 11,205 discharges for pleural empyema in 9,797 patients and finally included 4,095 patients matching the inclusion criteria. The excluded patients were either not residents in New York—resulting in a lack of follow-up data and incomplete longitudinal documentation within the database—and/or were suspected for secondary pleural empyema (1)